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The Order of the Stick: Battle for the Gate

The Order of the Stick is my favorite webcomic. It's based on Dungeons & Dragons, though you don't have to know anything about D&D to enjoy the comic.

To show you how awesome OotS is, I thought I'd share this extended sequence.

Okay, so, Xykon is an evil undead sorcerer who's trying to locate and control several magical gates scattered throughout the world. Doing so will give him control over an ancient evil, sealed away by the gods, that will give him the power to conquer the entire world. Our heroes managed to destroy one of these gates, so Xykon and his army have moved on to the next one - Soon's Gate in Azure City, which is sealed closed by the magical sapphire in the throne of Lord Shojo, the city's ruler.

Shortly before this, a rogue paladin who turned zealot thought Lord Shojo was working with Xykon, so she assassinated him. For this evil act, the gods stripped her of her powers and the Sapphire Guard imprisoned her, but the death of Shojo left an opening for Xykon to enter the throne room to personally claim the gate.

Xykon, it should be noted, is an unholy badass.

Hinjo, the late Lord Shojo's nephew and captain of the Sapphire Guard, is outside fighting off Xykon's troops.

The Sapphire Guard, it should be noted, are righteous badasses themselves.

Incidentally, the guy with the mustache is Soon Kim, the Guard's founder.

So Xykon's second-in-command, Redcloak, arrives. Redcloak is the prophet of the goblin god. He has a personal grudge against the Sapphire Guard for slaughtering his people.

We cut to Miko Miyazaki, the aforementioned ex-paladin who murdered Lord Shojo.

As much as I would want to see them, I don't think it'd be a good idea to post bonus strips. Rich has always been fiercely protective of his work. Posting strips meant to be incentive for people to buy the book would likely be considered theft by him.

They would just be the 2, from War and XPs, not No Cure. The laundry one, and the dinner reservations. Considering there are 12 others in that book alone, it would most likely fall under fair use, especially since I wouldn't just be posting them, I would be talking about them (academic discourse is covered in fair use). But Mr. Burlew has always been firm about protecting his intellectual property, which is what prevents me from making an OoTS icon. It's moot anyway. I'm not going to break my War and XPs book.

As much as I love order of the stick, I have nothing but the utmost contempt for the "bouncing symbol of insanity" strip. Seriously, the lengths you have to go to make that single strip believable, even considering it's Order of the Stick, just kill it for me. Thankfully it quickly gets back to being epic right after that.

Actually that struck me as being one of the more innovative forms of spellcasting I'd seen in a long time. If your spell is designed to cause chaos and only requires momentary physical contact to be effective, how better to rout a large troop like that?

That's the thing, it wasn't physical contact that activated the spell,it was apparently that it had been activated by the paladins reading the rune on the tiny bouncing ball. Heck it would have been a lot more effective just to have the rune on a piece of paper and hold it up. Same effect. It was also bizarre that so many paladins lost their will saves, but at least that could be explained by some of them being low level.

The Symbol is triggered by being read, but once triggered it affects anyone who enters its area of effect for several hours. By bouncing around, the Symbol not only affects many more people than its relatively small AoE would normally allow, but if forces multiple saves, since you have to save when you re-enter the AoE - that's why so many of the Paladins failed their saves.

A rune can be avoided by turning your head away, unles of course said rune is shooting around the place in random directions and as such is much more likely to be in your field of view than a lone person waving a piecve of paper around.

to be fair, hasn't the argument for that strip been " were this a campaign being played, that would've happened offscreen, and so you could pretty much just handwave that unless you wanted to roll for each and every one of the NPC paladins (and, hey, a few of them saved... then died) "

It wasn't meant to be a funny comic so no...not destroying humor. He was moving the plot along while showing how casually chaotic evil Xykon can be, but did it in a way that didn't really work for a good portion of his audience. So what?

That's for the most part what I was saying. I really don't think of that as a badass moment though. It was more like how Xykon is usually portrayed . He does stupid, goofy stuff and kills a bajillion people in the process (although yes, he's portrayed as badass too).

Some people liked this example, others though that strip in particular was...kind of stupid...and unlikely even for Order of the Stick.

I loved Lord Soon. And Miko's death was poignant - as much as I was going "YES! YOU MORON!" when she died, it was so very sad that she didn't get it. Soon's '...no.' was heartbreaking, even if I didn't like Miko at all.

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